Remote sensing: Commission participation in the VEGETATION programme
The European Commission, Joint Research Centre, has published a call for expressions of interest in a preparatory programme to develop a number of scientific and technical actions in the field of remote sensing. This is an initial step in the Commission's participation in the VEGETATION remote sensing programme established by France, Belgium, Italy and Sweden. The VEGETATION programme will complement the observation capabilities of the SPOT remote sensing satellites for the characterization of many aspects of the continental biosphere: productions in agriculture, forestry, pasture, and the impact of global and regional climate changes on vegetation and environment. An International User Committee has selected actions to be undertaken to prepare the user community for the integration of VEGETATION data into its projects: - The support for development or adaptation of applications, primarily for the sectoral policy of the European Union; - RTD developments on the use of remote sensing for problems related to the VEGETATION system (scaling, integration of high-frequency and high-resolution data, multitemporal analysis and modelling); - Developments for enhancement of proposed product definition or algorithms implemented in the VEGETATION ground-processing segment. The user community may also be interested in other more specific aspects of the use of VEGETATION. These should be outlined in the letter of interest. An invitation to tender, issued by the User Committee, will be open to all categories of investigators: research and educational institutions, non-profit institutions, government agencies, and related industrial companies. Selection of the proposed investigations will be performed by the Committee on the basis of their relevance to the objectives of the system and their quality, both for scientific purposes and operational applications. Organizations interested in this work should send letters of interest with a short description of their possible proposals for investigations and of their motivation and relevance to the programme (maximum of two typed pages). Invitations to tender will be sent in due course. Expressions of interest should be addressed to: Joint Research Centre Institute for Remote Sensing Applications VEGETATION International Users Committee TP 441 I-21020 Ispra (VA)